Valerie Babb
Photograph by Stephanie Trapp. www.trappfotos.com/
Writer, Professor, Public Intellectual
The Book of James: The Power, Politics and Passion of Lebron
LeBron James is the hero in two very American tales: one, a success story the nation loves; the other, the latest installment in an ongoing chronicle of American antiblackness. He’s the poor boy from a “broken” home in a poverty-stricken neighborhood who makes good. He’s also the poor Black boy who makes good, then at the apex of his career finds “n*****” spray-painted across the gate to his home.
James has lived in the public eye ever since high school when his extraordinary athletic skills subjected his every action, every statement, every fashion choice to intense public scrutiny that tells us less about James himself and more about an American landscape still wrestling with many social inequities. He uses his celebrity not to transcend Blackness, but to give it a place of cultural prominence. The backlash he receives reveals the frictions between Blackness and antiblackness. As a result, James’s story is a revelatory narrative of how much Blackness is loved, hated, misunderstood, and just plain cool in an America that has changed and yet not changed at all.
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Valerie Babb is Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University where she holds appointments in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of English. The author of multiple publications, her most recent is The Book of James: The Power, Politics, and Passion of LeBron. Other books include A History of the African American Novel, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture, Ernest Gaines, and the co-authored Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of “The Town of George” in 1751 to the Present Day. She developed and was creative consultant and producer for the video by the same name. She has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad and presented a Distinguished W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. A proud product of public education, she received her BA from Queens College, City University of New York and her MA and PhD, from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.